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Ruby Rails Routes and Resources A Route to a Delete Action Filters

Posted by Alex Bannon
Alex Bannon
4,841 Points

In Rails, Why Are Methods Symbols?

When defining a private method, say set_page, we can write it as the following in our private section

def set_page @page = Page.find(params[:id]) end

However, when we are utilizing this private method as a before_action in our controller, we write it as the following:

before_action :set_page, except: [:index, :new, :create]

Here, both the set_page method, as well as all of some of our normal crud methods, are being referenced as a symbol - as far as I'm aware symbols are the key reference in a hash. Are our methods in the PagesController class hashes?

1 Answer

Tim Knight
Tim Knight
28,888 Points
Tim Knight
Tim Knight
28,888 Points

Hi Alex—

Symbols are kind of an "internalized string" in Ruby which just really means it's a light weight version of a string and in the example given you're just passing those into the before _action method as an argument.

You might to check out the answer on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26786542/why-do-callbacks-use-symbols-in-ruby-on-rails which provides some helpful insight into why Rails (and Ruby) use symbols.